Three Collections of Czech Broadside Ballads: Creating, Organizing, and Providing Access

These authors focus on the most important collections of Czech broadside ballads. They delineate dual and quite different groups of collectors according to the collectors’ approaches to acquiring broadside ballads. The first (and earlier) scholarly but amateur type of collector viewed broadside ballads as supplementary, and by association “lower,” materials that necessarily documented the unfortunate blending of traditional and purely oral, i.e., “folk” songs; the second (and later) group of academics attempted to capture all aspects of printed productions of ballads that had been previously spurned, if grudgingly acknowledged, by the folklorists. The authors also describe the history and perspectives of cataloguing and digitalization broadside ballads.